One thing music is particularly good at expressing is longing — not just garden-variety desire for another human being, but a whole range of emotions that includes nostalgia, wish-fulfillment and fantasy. Those were the themes running through at least part of Wednesday night’s deftly programmed concert by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony.

The headline event for this occasion was the West Coast premiere of “Dispatches,” an ingenious and deeply touching work by composer Ted Hearne. It’s a piece that asks the question, “What does a composer do with a symphony orchestra when he’s really a rock-and-roller at heart?”

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The resulting 19-minute opus, which had its world premiere in January as part of the orchestra’s “New Voices” commissioning program along with the New World Symphony and the publisher Boosey and Hawkes, addresses the issue with both poignancy and optimism. And Wednesday’s performance, crisply led by conductor Christian Reif in a powerful Symphony debut, emphasized the music’s uneasy grace.

Episodic movements

“Dispatches,” which is built rather episodically around five connected movements, juxtaposes the centuries-old resources of an orchestra — with all the lush Romantic traditions that go along with it — with the more recent, and perhaps more communicatively urgent, musical strains that inform Hearne’s sensibilities. The first section adopts a four-note motif from a Stevie Wonder song, along with the harmonies that go with it, and subjects it to loving indignities; in a later section, the orchestra is driven into a fiercely motoric dance groove.

Throughout, Hearne is intent on heightening the contradictions (as the old leftists would have it) between the worlds of the orchestra and contemporary pop sensibilities. Rhythms and sonorities go out of phase with one another; luxuriant harmonies turn acerbic on a dime.

Yet there’s also an undercurrent of hope running through the entire piece. “Can’t we all get along?” goes the refrain, and the answer comes back in the affirmative.

A big part of that is due to Hearne’s virtuosic command of the orchestra. Even though he treats it as a foreign country, it’s clear that this is a landscape he knows well.

There’s a superbly inventive rhapsody midway through for a solo cello (Michael Grebanier lent this passage a particularly poker-faced eloquence) backed by cellos whose eerie sounds are shaped by the insertion of a cork between the strings. And the final section, a sparsely beautiful urban nocturne, is practically a textbook lesson in orchestral balance and timbre.

There are times when “Dispatches” calls to mind the nostalgia of a composer like Alfred Schnittke, with his heartbroken invocations of a musical past (Mozart and so on) that is beyond recovery. The difference is that the gap that interests Hearne is stylistic, not chronological — and that he shows it to be bridgeable after all.

Prose poem

For true, old-style nostalgia, Thomas led the orchestra in a sumptuous account of “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” Samuel Barber’s serene but heart-tugging setting of James Agee’s retrospective prose poem. With its purling rhythms and ingratiating melodic contours, this is a piece that constantly threatens to lapse into sentimentality.

The miracle of Barber’s writing is that it never does; you come out the other end deeply moved, but unsure how it happened. Soprano Susanna Phillips gave a lovely performance — lustrous, clear-eyed and judiciously shaped. Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony, in a sleek and ultimately vivid performance, occupied the program’s second half.

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